On the one hand, there is a real physical world out there with objects that we can see, hear, touch, and perceive. Living entities are the most intriguing of them all — we can talk to them, we can listen to them, we can play with them, we can fight with them, we can build relationships with them…
On the other hand, there is the mental world — the world of thoughts, emotions, ideas, and dreams. Mathematics, philosophy, music, painting etc. are major manifestations of this mental world. They often give us a glimpse of the existence of an abstract world beyond the physical world we live in: the abstract world that almost has a physical existence of its own, defying the word “abstract”.
We live in the physical world, with mountains, rivers, trees, animals, houses, roads, cars, schools, colleges, hospitals etc. But often, we encounter bridges to the abstract world like the 9 3/4-th platform in Harry Potter’s stories. These bridges range from critically acclaimed works of art like Claude Monet’s paintings, John Keats’s poetry, Amir Khusrao’s lyrics, and Plato’s dialogues to myriads of events we experience in pop culture: Sachin Tendulkar’s cover-drives on TV, Ultimate Warrior’s crazy promos before Wrestlemania, Rick and Morty’s trippy episodes, to name a few. In this blog, I shall try to explore several of these bridges between the physical world and the mental world, in a methodical fashion . At the core of all my posts recurs a constant struggle between two conflicting ideas: the idea of realism/ empiricism/ materialism (this world exists as it is independent of us and we are perceiving it through our sensory organs and modifying it through our motor organs) and the idea of idealism/ solipsism/ mysticism (there is nothing real in this world outside our mind; all our friends, family, jobs don’t really exist, they are just impressions in our mind and this world is nothing but a simulation). However, my posts don’t resolve the age-old debate among philosophers regarding these two contradictory epistemological positions. I don’t think anybody ever will be able to do so. But my posts simply put this debate in the right context, and throw more light on it.
One more thing, I have used the existing terminology in academic “philosophy” very freely here, and in my other posts, partly due to my my academic background in science, as opposed to philosophy, and partly due to my somewhat lack of reverence for existing academic “philosophy” to explore philosophical themes. I think, academic “philosophy” explores philosophical themes only through words, which are crafted in a meticulous fashion. But in my humble opinion, the same themes can only be captured if the words are supported by activities in day-to day-life, giving an appropriate context to those words. For example, how we talk to our colleagues, how we interact with our friends, how invested we are in our romances, etc. are as important as scholarly articles in understanding philosophy. As Kabir says,
“Labzo se hum khel rahe hai, maana haat na aaye,
Paani paani rat te rat te pyaasa hi raha jaaye
Shola shola rat te rat te lab par aanch na aaye
Ek chingari lab par rakh lo, lab turant jal jaaye”
(We are playing with words, but we don’t understand the meaning. We keep chanting “water” but we stay thirsty. We keep chanting “fire” but we don’t feel anything on our lips. But the moment we put a flame on our lips, our lips burn).
Growing up in a society full of friends, family, classes, jobs, degrees, and honours, it is very hard to perceive the possibility of the existence of a world beyond the physical. But life-experiences can be such (getting immersed in music or painting, a feeling of extreme pain or cornucopia of joy in love, an emptiness through isolation from society in a new country or job, etc.) that the existence of the abstract world not only becomes conceivable but can even dominate over the existence of the physical world, in one’s consciousness. Various thoughts are incessantly going on in our heads; we translate only a few of those thoughts into action. In mathematical language, a many-to-one mapping takes place from the mental world to the physical world. In extraordinary circumstances like solitude, it is often hard to distinguish the world of thoughts from the world of action because there are too many thoughts and too few actions. The lack of onlookers to verify the reality perceived through our senses adds to it. After all, our consciousness is largely collective; we imbibe a lot of the common sense, which we use for our day-to-day activities, from society through collective wisdom. And with lack of people, the collective wisdom may start fading.
And with it, often comes lurking forward the fear of death — an event that is probably absolute in a world full of conflicting ideas and arguments and events, where probably every argument can be countered by another argument. Though I shall attempt to make the posts in my blog as drenched in bright sunshine as possible, somewhat like Ruskin Bond’s writing, I cannot guarantee that death won’t expose its dark face here and there in the posts.
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Aranyak Sen Blog 